''The rivers were a nuisance and a danger, polluted and suited for neither commerce nor recreation,'' he said. Remembering Fenwick in her autobiography, Come learn more about Katharine Hepburn’s life in Connecticut, her extraordinary film and stage career and her iconic style when you visit Katharine Hepburn surveys the devastation of the 1938 hurricane on the site of her family’s summer home in Fenwick, CT.Katharine Hepburn sits amid the rubble left after the 1938 hurricane at Fenwick. The high death toll was due to the lack of hurricane warnings: forecasters simply expected the hurricane to turn east and proceed out to sea.

Luckily, most of the family left before the storm made landfall. The first picture captures Hepburn's thoughts as to what she had just been through; a Category 5 hurricane. The dike held, but if it hadn't, The Hartford Courant reported that Mayor Thomas Spellacy had intended to dynamite a dike to the south to divert the river from the Colt area.
Katharine Hepburn amid the remains of her home in Old Saybrook after the Hurricane of '38. ''My father had been a writer of cowboy stories, but a writer getting a half-cent a word in the Depression couldn't support a family,'' Mr. Collier said.

''Had the storm hit a few weeks earlier, during the peak summer season, the New England death toll might have been 6,000 instead of 600, Mr. Manchester noted.After four days of drenching rain, Sept. 21, 1938, a Wednesday, had dawned sunny and calm. Hepburn knew her father, who was not there at the time, would be worried so she left her family and fought the wind to reach the town’s main street. After 25 summers spent with the extended Hepburn clan filling the house, it felt like a permanent fixture in their lives, and it remained a touchstone and retreat for daughter Katharine even after her Hollywood career brought her fame and success. The 1938 New England Hurricane was one of the deadliest and most destructive tropical cyclones to strike Long Island, New York, and New England. At the time, it was the worst hurricane in more than 100 years.The fast moving hurricane took a destructive path from the New Jersey coast, across the eastern half of Long Island and into New England. ''The State Department of Transportation estimated 50,000 trees had fallen across roads and onto buildings and cars, creating the need for a months-long cleanup. A quarter-mile of the business district was destroyed and the entire downtown area was threatened before a timely shift in the wind enabled firefighters, sometimes working in water up to their necks, to control the fires.Herbert Janick, a history professor at Western Connecticut State College, wrote: ''Ships torn from their moorings slammed around the New London harbor, wrecking wharfs before sinking or beaching themselves. A tidal surge drove the 500-foot sailing ship Marsala into a warehouse complex along the docks, causing explosions and six fires that burned out of control for more than seven hours.

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Photo courtesy of Old Saybrook Historical SocietyKatharine Hepburn amid the remains of her home in Old Saybrook after the Hurricane of '38. Up to 800 people on Long Island and in New England were not so fortunate, losing their lives as a result of the hurricane. Digging through the debris, Katharine Hepburn recovered the family silver and her mother’s tea service. The storm formed near the coast of Africa on September 9, becoming a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale, before making landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on Long Island on September 21.

The actress loved the summer home and spent much of her off time there in relative privacy.
''One couple was in the middle of dinner,'' R.A. Scotti wrote the book ''Sudden Sea,'' an account of the hurricane published this year. Then there was a rip and a crash and the big laundry wing fell off the back of the house.

''Christopher Collier, the state historian, was 8 years old on Sept. 21 and staying with an elderly aunt just over the Connecticut line from Thompson in Webster, Mass., while his parents were making final arrangements to move to Wilton in October. See more ideas about Hurricane, New england, Storm surge. “The Hurricane of ’38.” PBS.

Katharine Hepburn’s home in Old Saybrook, where she was in residence, was inundated by the storm, and she lost more than 90% of her belongings as a result, though she was able to escape to safety. They reached higher ground just in time to turn and see the family summer home float away.


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